As someone whose favourite game of all time is Morrowind, a game where one NPC shifted slowly over the course of the game until he died when he shifted underwater, I don't say this lightly: the games are becoming less worth the jank.

I was and still am 100% with Jeff on this one. It actually baffled me how strongly against him Austin was, I think I've never seen Austin being so irrational. I was also a bit surprised that no one else supported Jeff (besides Vinny, but was a bit more in the middle).

Some could say that the pros outweigh the cons, but Fallout 4 barely has any pros to justify the insane amount of jank that it has for a modern game. Bethesda needs to drastically improve their Elder Scrolls and Fallout games on jank levels, game engine, story, quest design and overall gameplay. It feels like they're still stuck in the Morrowind/Oblivion eras. Sure the way the games are were fine back then, but not anymore. People should expect and demand more. If we keep accepting this jank then we're part of the problem and they will never come up with better games.

Also, I wonder how the public reaction would have been if this jank was from other company/game instead of Bethesda's Fallout. I bet everyone would be mad.

I was 100% with Jeff/Vinny on this (and part of what pushed me there was how bad I thought Brad/Austin's arguments were). I agree that Bethesda games have always had jank, but that's not an excuse; and, more than that, it's easier to look over the jank when the world is enrapturing on its own. Bethesda has never had great writing, but Morrowind was such an amazing place that I could overlook most problems, and that was such an achievement with the hardware of the time that the jank was more acceptable. Fallout 4 was not such an amazing world, and after so many iterations of the same concept, its just should not be acceptable how bad that game performed.

I was in the fuck bethesda camp. Can't give me a fallout 4 like that in a world where the Witcher exists.
There is still a lot more going in those games, but the Fallout coudl really improve in all aspects.

Fallout 4's biggest issue was that is was just plain boring, the story was full of plot holes, and the world was bland and unenjoyable. That made the normal jank you would expect with Bethesda games harder to ignore, however Fallout 4 also seemed to be the most jankiest game they have released.

Whatever BGS next big game is, I hope to god they have a new engine for it, cause I won't do another game on the current engine. FO4 made me realize this.

Jeff/Vinny 100%. I was shaking my head throughout that entire thing. We should always be evolving and improving - games are no different. In a year where The Witcher 3 was also released it was more unbelievable. True enough I guess it doesn't have the same open world and character customization and had its fair share of bugs/glitches too, but it was light years ahead of Bethesda's showing.

Oh man, I'm torn on this game. Besides Destiny, Fallout 4 is prob my game with most hours sunk into it. I agree with the argument that it was/is nothing new from Fallout 3, and the jank/crashing was near unbearable, but the inclusion of the crafting/settlement aspect kept me HOOKED well beyond finishing the game and all the DLC. Going back into dangerous areas looking for copper or nuclear material with respawned enemies was a lot of fun. After I started to wind down playing it, they went and added survival mode which brought me back in for another ungodly amount of time. After THAT got old, they then released mod support on ps4, and well....you can guess the rest.

BEST BROKEN GAME OF 2015

I lean more towards Jeff and Vinny with each game Bethesda releases.

I'm worried they'll use their Creation Engine for the next Elder Scrolls or Fallout game. That engine is based on Gamebryo which they've been using since Morrowind. I'm replaying Fallout 4, and it seems pretty clear to me that Creation Engine is past the age of retirement. There must be several engines out there that are far superior technologically. Hopefully they'll use some of that Skyrim money to license one of them.

The new engine deal breaker might be mod support. Bethesda is aware of how much their customers love their mods, so I doubt they'd use an engine that doesn't support them.

I'm generally with Jeff and Vinny on this one. Some of that has to do with the game though. I was willing to look past some of that jank for Skyrim because I thought it was a vastly superior game. On the other hand, I really don't like the way Bethesda has handled the Fallout license, so I'm not as willing to overlook the flaws.

Plus, I think that they should just generally be doing better, from a management/design perspective if nothing else. I know huge open world games are kind of their thing, but at a certain point if you can't guarantee a certain level of quality you need to consider bringing back the scope a little bit.

I was also with Jeff/Vinny, in that I feel that Fallout 4's bugs and jank are certainly inexcusable. However, to address your point about Brad/Austin's arguments, they weren't saying the bugs were excusable; they were saying they were expected, and so the game shouldn't be on the Most Disappointing list for 2015, which I also agree with. I think Fallout 4 is a mediocre game that doesn't meaningfully advance the Fallout formula and in some ways is even a step backwards from New Vegas, and that's disappointing. But the bugs and jank are things that have plagued their games forever. So, like Brad, Austin, and Dan when they announced Fallout 4, I certainly expected bugs/jank and therefore wasn't disappointed by it. I don't think Jeff/Vinny's and Brad/Austin's arguments are mutually exclusive. I think the bad stuff in Fallout 4 is inexcusable given how much time/money Bethesda had to fix even some of the problems with their games, but I also think people shouldn't be disappointed by it because that's the low bar they've set for themselves for more than a decade now - people are just starting to notice it more because now there are a ton of open world games like The Witcher 3 or Breath of the Wild coming out to compare Bethesda games to. To me, it all comes down to drawing a distinction between a "bad game" and a "disappointing game", and IMO, Fallout 4 is just a mediocre game that I expected to be mediocre.

As someone who makes games for a living, you don't get a Fallout or Elder Scrolls game without the jank. Not with the way modern video games are made. So you either accept the jank, or don't get the game.

EDIT: More details. First of all, I'm not commenting on the quality of the game here. Fallout 4 is not a fun game, but that doesn't affect my opinion on its bugginess. And when I'm talking about jank, I mean quest lines bugging out, characters falling through the floor, followers getting lost forever, phsyics oddities and things of that nature. Of course, save corrupting or game breaking bugs are always unacceptable, but I don't think that the number of people that experience these bugs in Bethesda games is significant compared to the number who buy the game. This discussion is regarding jank, and that's all. The average level of buggyness a consumer will experience in a Bethesda RPG is within acceptable limits.

I would be more forgiving of Bethesda's jank if it was a better game, or at least a more interesting one. Fallout 4 was neither.

I got Fallout 4 recently for dirt cheap and I'm still unhappy w/ the purchase. Jank & bugs I can overlook if the story/writing/characters make up for it. It's okay, I guess - a few gems in what I played of it - but just not a good game IMO.

This is the same argument with Tell Tale games honestly. How can they continue to make games on a busted foundation? Oh wait, because people don't hold them accountable and they still buy all their games...

Pretty much agree with this. Nothing about Fallout 4 was that memorable. It suffered from them putting in systems that nobody really asked for and that weren't very good on release. Base building was just more of a hassle and a side distraction.

The stories and characters in Fallout 4 weren't very good. The combat was the same old, despite promises of improved aiming in real time. And the jank was as janky as ever.

@afabs515: My feeling (and I felt this is what Jeff was saying too, but I could be wrong) is that something can be expected, but still be disappointing when it happens. I can expect something, but still hold out hope that I'll be wrong, and losing that hope is disappointing.

E.g. I expected Fallout 4 to be a janky mess and I was disappointed that my expectations were fulfilled and that Bethesda was not able to rise above it. And I was even more disappointed that they weren't at least able to distract from the jank with well-written characters and a good story (they have enough subsidiary studios that write well that I was hoping the main studio writers would've picked up some ideas).

I was very disappointed with Fallout 4, but none of that has to do with bugs and glitches. If the game was great like Skyrim was when it came out, then I honestly don't care about the bugs Bethesda games usually have. I could also understand if other people thought differently about this, weren't it not for the fact that these games have always been glitchy and will continue to be glitchy, so I actually don't understand if one buys and plays Fallout 4 and then complains about glitches as a reason to not like the game. At some point, you should just blame yourself for not having realistic expectations. Mark my words: the next Elder Scrolls and Fallout games will also have plenty of glitches, so don't buy them if you can't stand that.

I think Jeff and Vinny are just fed up with how long Bethesda has continued to release their open world games like this. It's overlookable the first time, acceptable the next time or two... but the more times they tried to repackage and resell Skyrim, the less slack they need to be given on this. Fallout 4 got it especially bad because the game was not as great on its own merits, story and gameplay, which is something I've expounded on before.

I'm with the people who don't have a problem with the jank so much as the mediocre story. I actually kind of love it now purely from a "let's go fuck around and completely ignore the main story" perspective but that's not for everyone and I think trying to market that idea is hard.

I think people aren't fully appreciating the difference between open worlds and open systems games very well especially when they make comparisons to something like The Witcher 3. That's not to say one is better than the other but it's flawed to think they're necessarily equivalent.

That game was bad for more reasons than just the Bethesda jank, but they need to fix their issues with the engine, if not just make a new engine. Those problems might have been acceptable in the Oblivion/Fallout 3 era, but not anymore.

I think the whole "ocean as deep as a puddle" concept that Bethesda relies on doesn't really work anymore as other games in the RPG genre have done more in recent years. I really don't want to play those types of games anymore. Make it smaller and deeper. Being able to "go anywhere and do anything" doesn't matter if you get board 3 hours in just doing the same quests over and over again.

No other games do what Bethesdas do for me, the jank is such an insignificant part in comparison.

I didn't encounter too much jank when I played Fallout 4, but I also didn't really love the game either. After my first playthrough I didn't have any desire to go back to it.

Fuck those people who are saying that the jank is part of the charm, though. How about just changing your engine, I'm sure Skyrim's re-re-re-releases have brought in enough cash money for that by now.

I was tired of Bethesda Game Studios' jank-ass crap at Fallout 3.

Needless to say I'm glad fewer and fewer people are willing to give BGS a pass for that crap.

@humanity:

I personally had almost 0 problems when playing FO4. Some bad pathing by the AI companions, but that's about it. I put over 100 hours into the game and I don't remember encountering any bugs. (I also wasn't stupid enough to play the game on a console, so my performance was fine.) That's in very sharp contrast to New Vegas, a game that Jeff praised, which was a technical abomination in my experience (I encountered tons of bugs and it kept crashing to desktop every couple hours, even after being patched), and quite a bit better than Skyrim and FO3.

Is stating my good experience with the game "giving it a pass". Do I need to be outraged over the bugs people claim to have encountered, but I didn't?

This is why I'm very wary of Skyrim/Fallout VR, especially on PS4. The games have to run at a high refresh rate and enough of a resolution to not get sick, imagine the framerate taking a nosedive while in VR or the janky crap happening making you completely sick. Even more wary of it because they are going to be full price versions.

I'm on team Jeff. I don't buy this argument that it has to be this way. Its only this way because they sell tons without having to improve anything or at least make it stable. There is really no excuse why this game performs so poorly on nearly every piece of hardware available. The constant hitching, freezing, and crashing is just really annoying which is only made worse because its in a "meh" fallout game with very little rpg mechanics and player agency and a crappy story that makes no sense.

Fallout 4 is a good and possibly great game. Some people are just tired of that style of game.

I thought New Vegas overcame its technical hiccups. Fallout 4 did not.

The jank wasn't the biggest problem for me, it was the dumbing down of the rpg elements, the boring quests that were all the same, and the god awful story. Even without the jank Fallout 4 is a 3 star game.

@blindx0r: if you personally didn't encounter anything then no, good for you. I was referring to a lot of people that did in fact encounter a ton of bugs but still wrote them off as a necessary, and sometimes weirdly enough, a welcome fun quirk rather than an actual problem that Bethesda didn't seem to care enough to address. None of your scripting broke, none of your items disappeared or saves for corrupted and that awesome for you - sadly a lot of others had these issues to the point where it wasn't just a few isolated cases. The very same problems that lots of people have been experiencing since Fallout 3 that make the series a lottery of whether you'll experience their next entry like you did with FO4 or how you did with New Vegas.

I didn't play enough to really experience any bugs. Trying to fight against the ui just wasn't worth it.

They've been doing this for 15 years. They just need to put some serious time into overhauling their broke-ass engine.

Hopefully me responding to this isn't considered a necro, I just needed time to think about this.

I'm a weirdo when it comes to Bethesda. I have such low expectations of everything with their name on it. The main reason why Fallout 4 is my favorite of their games is mainly due to the fact that the combat is actually functional. Nothing about Bethesda games were ever about quality, they were always about quantity. Mods make these games for a reason. People have fond memories of Morrowind partly b/c the game didn't hold your hand and that would be my favorite if the combat wasn't...weirdly unintuitive.

But back on track, my low expectations make me side more with Austin if only b/c it was expected. Fallout 4 was everything it was advertised as, a quantity over quality experience that you basically just mess around with. The sense of roleplaying they changed from their Morrowind days is unfortunate, but I expected Fallout 4 to be a more of an FPS than an RPG. The bugs and such come with the package. With the reception they got, I can't imagine them getting away without any sense of polish anymore. I do think we've reached the point of diminishing returns. So while my biases point me towards team Austin, they very well will go towards team Jeff if they don't get their shit together.

I was on the side of "I rented Fallout 3 and thought it was fun but I only ever rented it and so I played whatever amount of it I played before I had to take it back and, fun fact! It's the last game I ever rented," and, "well, I tried to play either Oblivion or Skyrim on a friend's console at some point and my basic experience with it was a combination of anxiety over whether I was doing the right thing under their watchful gaze and a total lack of interest in progressing because my first combat encounter felt painfully awkward from a first person perspective without guns and so I turned the console off."

Nothing was broken for me. Beside saying "Bethesda should move on from this engine", I didn't simply didn't have the problems they discussed.

Well, it is not about you and your narrow experience. Fact is that there is still numerous broken quest lines (like with lvl 4 merchants), repeatable annoying bugs (like followers falling of the Prydwen on the survival difficulty), false item descriptions, wrong animations triggering, corpses falling from the sky, busted geometry... that most people encounter still because after all this time, these things are not patched. It would be one thing if they made some effort to fix most of them, but they don't even seem to be willing to do that.

Doors aren't functional. Ladders aren't functional. Shit is broken. The conversations are a weird, awkward mess. Existing in those worlds is stifling and hard to navigate.

It's not impressive anymore than I can pick up any toaster or fork that my heart desires. It's not shocking to happen upon a couple enemies (badly and embarrassingly) fighting each other. I don't care that it renders a molerat before I can see it. That is just not worth the bugs and graphical niggles and slowdown. Their worlds aren't interesting, their writing is atrocious, and their games are past the point of being impressive or spectacular and they need to fix their engine. The last time I was amazed that I could mess with cheese or knock a pot over was Oblivion, and even that game was too damn boring to stick with for any amount of time. From there, it's been a steady move towards oversimplification mechanically and neglecting the state of their games.

There needs to be more to justify the messiness.

Oh, I was firmly in the Jeff and Vinny camp. That debate drove me up the wall. I respect Brad and Austin's opinions, but ugh... their "this jank is just the price you pay for the game's size and scope" argument was rubbish. Bethesda Softworks has been using the Gamebryo engine for twenty years now. That's two decades of experience with the same engine. Two decades of time to customize, refine (hopefully) and tweak it to get it to run their chosen subgenre of games better.

I expected... some forward momentum and improvement with Fallout 4. Better animations, less janky bugs, improved main quest writing, something. I didn't see any of that, in my humble opinion. It was a lateral step with a janky, slightly broken version of the Hearthfire DLC from Skyrim thrown in, and frankly... Fallout 3 was 8 years before Fallout 4. A lateral step was not what the franchise needed almost a decade down the line.

If Brad and Austin are actually right and Bethesda truly can't get the jank down with the way they currently design games on Gamebryo, maybe the company needs to take a good, hard look at scaling down some of the endless, concurrently running scripts. Maybe NPCs don't need to have daily schedules they adhere to. Maybe the Elder Scrolls Online route is more the way to go, with shops always open no matter the time and things a little more static. Less systems running in the background that can crap out. Less time spent planning every single NPCS's weekly routines and more time spent on general "polish" and world content like unique dungeons and side quests.

If Elder Scrolls VI: Valenwood (or whatever area it is. Wishful thinking here) has a poorly conceived and written main quest like Fallout 4, a half-baked base building mechanic, a world filled with lego-block dungeons that have as few unique set pieces as possible to cut development time and cost, truckloads of jank, and framerate problems on consoles like Fallout 4 did on the PS4... well, I'm not sure Bethesda is going to be able to coast along on consumer and reviewer goodwill forever.

And this is coming from someone that loved Skyrim, jank be darned. Bethesda Softwork's competitors are getting better at building these kind of games (i.e.: The Witcher 3). It's time to refine and optimize.

Edit addition: to be honest, Fallout 4 still worries me in a nerdy, idiotic sort of way. I bounced off that game in about six and a half hours and never went back. I've never done that before on a Bethesda Softworks title. I spent 50 hours or so playing Morrowind (never beat it. Just wandered and eventually drifted on to something else with a smile on my face), 80+ hours in Fallout 3, 200+ in Oblivion, and 187 or so hours in Skyrim. Nothing with Fallout 4 clicked with me. I'd truthfully be rather sad if TES VI followed a similar blueprint, which it sounds like it will. The interviews during the Fallout 4 pre-launch media blitz bragging about how much development time and cost was saved by using modular dungeon designs and few, if any, expensive set pieces basically described WHY I became so bored by what felt like an endless expanse of the same thing over and over.

"Oh duder, you fool. Oblivion had five or six dungeon types repeated over and over to make 300 dungeons that blurred together into a bland mixture of madness, and you liked it anyway." Yes, I did... in 2006, 11 years ago going on 12. I still do, because it's a decade old game and I give it some allowances. I'm going to be far less enthralled all these years later by Bethesda doubling down on that kind of design. :-/